![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Posted on the following Thursday, for reasons.
What I Finished Reading This Week
The Dog Stars – Peter Heller
This book did not agree with me and I HAD THOUGHTS. Strap in.
Peter Heller, is deeply insecure about masculinity. You will get a sense of this from the excerpts from my reactions to the book below, but it will not compare to the experience of reading 319 unrelenting pages of it, which is what I did. Like wow, aside from an appreciation of nature, there is not much that appeals about Heller's take on the world.
The Dog Stars is narrated by "Hig" a late-middle-aged white dude who lives at Erie airport in Colorado "nine years out. The flu killed almost everybody, then the blood disease killed more." (The book suggests that the dual pandemic was also accompanied by a massive bird, fish, mammal, and flora die-off, as well as catastrophic global warming, and that these things are somehow connected, but doesn't explain how.)
Hig is good at Manly Things like Hunting, Fishing, Having No Patience For Small Talk, and Working With His Hands, although Heller makes sure to tell us that he doesn't enjoy killing animals, let alone people, he just does them because that's what his uncle who died of cancer, and his current sole human companion, Bangley, do. Bangley, a hyper masculine doomsday prepper alpha male—think Jayne Cobb 'roided out by a factor of 1,000—who loves Guns, Porno, and Killing; regularly belittles Hig because Hig cooks, cleans, and gardens; and would probably communicate exclusively with grunts and chest-beating if Heller thought he could get away with writing him that way. In addition to Bangley, Peter starts the novel with a regulation Loyal Canine(TM), Jasper.
There's a community of Mennonites to whom Hig occasionally delivers scavenged Coke but whom he's careful to stay 60 feet away from at all times during those rare visits. Every other human who appears, Bangley and Hig kill on sight. In fact, they've rigged a lure to attract people to the exact spot in the airport where it's easy to ambush them and pick them off from a distance. When it all Gets To Be Too Much, Hig takes to the skies in his Cesna for some Manly Aviation and Manly Solitude. He radios air traffic towers out of ironic habit; one time he thought he heard a faint transmission from the tower in Junction, but now he wonders if anyone was really there at all.
The book's front and back cover, and its first several pages are stuffed with breathless reviews from big name newspapers, magazines, and authors. For instance, according to The Boston Globe, "Peter Heller serves up an insightful account of physical, mental, and spiritual survival unfolded in dramatic and often lyrical prose".
Well, let's see. Heller doesn't use quotation marks, and rarely uses punctuation and or complete sentences. Hig's narration spills out in endless, frequently one-line paragraphs, a slightly more evolved "Me Tarzan, you Jane" form of (apparently) Manly Communication. Por ejemplo, here's an early conversation between Hig and Bangley:
Here's another example of what The New York Journal of Books calls "sparkling prose with truly memorable, shining, characters", a passage in which Bangley, Hig, and Jasper have just killed a family of scavengers who had the misfortune of stumbling onto Hig's turf:
Anyway, we'll skip over a lot of tedious "plot" in which Bangley belittles Hig for not being violent enough, Hig decides he's had it, takes Jasper on a hunting trip into the mountains, and Jasper dies of exposure. Hig and Bangley then kill another group of people who had the misfortune to stumble onto Hig's turf after Hig returns, prompting Hig to fuel up his Cesna and fly off into the sunset as far as it will go so he can Grieve In Manly Solitude. And if he decides he doesn't want to die in Manly Solitude, hey, there's always the possibility of refueling at Junction and returning home. This is basically the entire first half of the book.
The second half of the book is basically Penthouse Letters.
With a few gallons of fuel left in the tank, Hig flies over a secluded canyon in the mountains. Here's what happens next, in Heller's trademark "savage, tender, brilliant" (per Glen Duncan's glowing review) prose:
The man Hig has ambushed and intimidated on his home turf (The same thing that Hig murders every other human being he's encountered thus far in the book for doing, let's not forget) is understandably enraged "If a man can spark he was sparking: mouth compressed in rage and his eyes which were gray were throwing off glints of fury." And as for the woman?
One images a real woman would also be angered and terrified by Hig's actions. But Heller doesn't write real women, he writes Real Women, so instead we get this: "She looked scared but also something else: mildly amused". And "Kept the scope on her. She smiled. Actually smiled. It was subtle, small, but at ten power I could see the damn thing."
Real Women, obviously, are intrigued by violent lunatics who appear out of nowhere and threaten to kill them and their families. Thus, Heller has Hig continue his...flirtations.
Right?
Feel free to insert the Padme meme here.
In this "at times funny, at times thrilling, at times simply heartbreaking" book about the "series of decisions about how we live in whatever world we've got" (per the Salt Lake City Weekly) these characters are not going to act out of common sense, self-preservation, or intelligence. Oh, not at all.
...offer to cook him lunch.
That thing you are hearing right now? That is my laughter. Sorry, I mean, it's my "breath catching and my heart aching" (which is what the Aspen Daily News says reading this book will do to readers). And I mean, my heart was aching a bit at this point. ::ahem:: Anyway.
We'll skip over a bunch more pages as Hig moves in with the family and nothing much happens until the father takes him aside and demands that Hig fly them out of the canyon so they don't starve to death in the coming drought. Wait, a drought is coming? you ask. Apparently. How does the father know there will be a drought? He just does, okay.
Anyhoodle. It's clear Hig's time in Eden is drawing to a close, so of course Heller is going to let him get his nut on. How will it happen? I am sure literally no one among you is asking right now.
Too bad. I am going to tell you all anyway. Like I said, Hig wants to get his nut on, but as a Manly Man he is Too Proud To Beg. But don't worry! The daughter is a Real Woman, ready to do her part. One day, she strips naked and waits for Hig at the waterfall where he goes for his Routine Manly Solitude.
Right now, you are thinking that you already saw this softcore pornos like this on Cinemax and there is no need for Heller to rehash any of them here. Indeed, you have and there is not. But Heller does anyway:
It was at this point that I found myself fervently wishing language had never been invented, because then I would never have found myself reading this ridiculous book.
Anyway, they have a dumb conversation about the bird they just saw, and then Hig takes his blue balls off to his hammock for some Manly Displacement Pondering about things that are Definitely Not Female Body Parts.
I should mention that the daughter was apparently a doctor, in the before times, the long long ago. She is presumably aware of the potential dangers associated with pregnancy and childbirth even in a modern, developed world with condoms, and birth control, and sanitation, and medicine, and hospitals, and emergency medical care. But do we get even a hint of that here, in this, "the world's most poetic survival guide" (at least according to Publisher's Weekly), a glimmer of the suggestion that the possibility of finding herself pregnant might have occasioned just a seed of anxiety in the mind of a female doctor—or indeed any woman—living in a post-apocalyptic plague-wracked hellworld where precisely none of those things are available? Let alone this female doctor, who also (I should mention) apparently has an autoimmune disease that makes her bruise and bleed at the drop of a hat (and oh, does Heller dwell lovingly on all those bruises). Of course not! Silly reader, that's the sort of stuff that only real women worry about.
What does trouble this Real Woman is the sudden memory that she has a dead husband. In fact, it troubles her so much she has second thoughts about letting Hig do sex on her again. Hig feels very bad about this:
And jeez, guys, if only there was something sexually arousing you could do for a woman that doesn’t involve a penis in a vagina.
Gosh.
Too bad nothing like that exists in the world.
The scene continues:
(PS: "Wanger." "WANGER." Talk about "a novel with the soul of haiku" (per The Columbus Dispatch)).
But anyway, back to Hig's Important Existential Problem. After another paragraph of moping about how "what may have been transmitted at the critical moment the moment of truth, of penetration, was her own memory of the dream", something surprising happens:
According to Heller, it’s a real chore.
Man, is Heller insecure about masculinity. So insecure that he can't conceive of oral sex as an end in its own right. As something that a woman would confidently ask for, even a woman confident enough to repeatedly strip naked to seduce you. So insecure about masculinity that he thinks of oral sex as something women have to jokingly, apologetically, indirectly suggest their partners might maybe possibly consider doing, a yucky obligation men occasionally have to grit their teeth and power through in order to get to have "real" sex.
Which, predictably, Hig and the daughter do, and which predictably is what makes the daughter come, not the oral sex. Man, is this ever the sort of novel "that makes you happy for literature" (per Juno Diaz and The Wall Street Journal).
Anyway, this is—pun mostly not intended—pretty much the climax of the book. In its final 50 pages, the three of them manage to fly back to Erie, find Bangley on the edge of death after having slaughtered some more unfortunates during Hig's absence, the daughter nurses him back to health (noooow we see why Heller made her a doctor, because some character was going to have to tend to Bangley during his long convalescence, but nursing and caregiving are wimmin's work, and Heller's not about to have Hig engage in that), and that's it. The end.
Except, oh! I completely for got to mention: before the three make it back to Erie, they take a brief detour to Junction, where they discover that Hig hadn't imagined things—there really is someone in the air traffic tower, radioing any aircraft that fly by. It will probably not surprise you to learn that said person is doing this to lure pilots to the airport so they can kill them.
For some reason this utterly enrages Hig and the dad, who promptly undertake a Call of Duty-esque raid to execute this person for having the temerity to do the exact same thing Hig, Bangley, and literally everyone else in this novel has been doing the entire time: killing every other human they encounter on sight.
And just who was this Big Bad, anyway? Get ready, cause Heller has a curveball up his sleeve for you. It's not Bangley's long-lost twin brother, not those murderous A-rabs who Heller foreshadowed but did nothing with, lo those 150+ pages ago, but...
...wait for it...
...an elderly cat lady. No joke. Because of-fucking-course it is:
And really, that's just what's so utterly bonkers about this book. Like, repeatedly throughout its 319 pages, as Hig kept failing to feel less regret about showing mercy to strangers instead of summarily executing them; kept feeling shame about not enjoying guns, or killing, or violence as much as Bangley; kept talking about how isolated and lonely he felt; kept feeling shame and horror when tragedies made him cry; throughout that entire time, I kept waiting for Heller to roll out that gradual character progression: that slowly dawning realization that compassion, and distaste for violence, and the mere existence of emotions; that the desire for community—hell even the trivial recognition that liking to cook—that none of those things are incompatible with What It Means To Be A Man. But that is not, not, not the story progression Heller is putting this character on. No, not at all.
There's a short paragraph in the section of the book where Hig, the father, and the daughter are preparing to leave the canyon that's pretty fucking telling. The daughter wants to take some of their lambs with them, but Hig runs the numbers and realizes that not only do they not have enough fuel to take the lambs' extra weight on board, but: “My calculations showed that the best way to have any chance at all of taking off, of clearing the trees, was to leave the old man.” Hig is Very Worried. Not at the horrible necessity of having to abandon the father of the woman he's nutting, but at the possibility the father might try to kill Hig when Hig explains this.
But then Hig hits on an idea. He’ll let the dad do the calculations himself, and then there can be no question that they have no choice but to abandon him. So that’s exactly what Hig does:
To Heller, the source of Hig's problems isn't the narrow definition of traditional masculinity and the assumptions Hig makes about what "men" should or shouldn't be like or do. The source of Hig's problems is precisely that Hig isn't the alpha male patriarch in the room...and the solution to Hig's problems is to become the alpha male patriarch in the room. To leave zero doubt in anyone's mind that Hig is "not a homo". To become The Man everyone depends on, the man everyone defers to, the only guy who's fucking a woman, the lone Penis Human at the top of the pyramid who commands respect from everyone and depends on no one for anything.
That's Heller's happily-ever-after ending for Hig: cucking Bangley (who starts the book as its alpha male and ends it as a cripple who owes his life to Hig), cucking the dad (a former Navy SEAL and Afghanistan vet who starts the book ably defending his home and daughter and ends depending on Hig for his home and his life, while Hig fucks his daughter), and saving the Mennonites, to whom Hig brings a female to do the nursing and caregiving Hig won't, and on and on.
And here's the thing. I have no problem with juvenile wish-fulfillment fantasies, whether they're catering to horny woman romantasy readers, or 14-year-old boys, or 40-year-old boys. But the minute that you and your publishing bro buddies start suggesting that your 40-year-old-boy wish-fulfillment fantasy is saying something beautiful, transcendent, and universal about the human experience..that is the point at which I have no regret about pointing out how cringe you are you are and how dumb your juvenile wish-fulfillment fantasy is. This author is cringe and his juvenile wish-fulfillment fantasy is dumb.
What I Am Currently Reading
Lake of Souls - Ann Leckie
I'll have this wrapped up by next Wednesday for sure.
The Goddess and the Tree - Ellen Cannon Reed
I read the prologue.
The Laws of Brainjo – Josh Turknett
A reread; first completed in 2023.
What I’m Reading Next
This week I acquired Danielle Jensen's A Fate Inked in Blood, 김미정의 한나랑 떠나는 신나는 성경여행, and 한재홍의 콩쥐 팥쥐.
これで以上です。
What I Finished Reading This Week
The Dog Stars – Peter Heller
This book did not agree with me and I HAD THOUGHTS. Strap in.
Peter Heller, is deeply insecure about masculinity. You will get a sense of this from the excerpts from my reactions to the book below, but it will not compare to the experience of reading 319 unrelenting pages of it, which is what I did. Like wow, aside from an appreciation of nature, there is not much that appeals about Heller's take on the world.
The Dog Stars is narrated by "Hig" a late-middle-aged white dude who lives at Erie airport in Colorado "nine years out. The flu killed almost everybody, then the blood disease killed more." (The book suggests that the dual pandemic was also accompanied by a massive bird, fish, mammal, and flora die-off, as well as catastrophic global warming, and that these things are somehow connected, but doesn't explain how.)
Hig is good at Manly Things like Hunting, Fishing, Having No Patience For Small Talk, and Working With His Hands, although Heller makes sure to tell us that he doesn't enjoy killing animals, let alone people, he just does them because that's what his uncle who died of cancer, and his current sole human companion, Bangley, do. Bangley, a hyper masculine doomsday prepper alpha male—think Jayne Cobb 'roided out by a factor of 1,000—who loves Guns, Porno, and Killing; regularly belittles Hig because Hig cooks, cleans, and gardens; and would probably communicate exclusively with grunts and chest-beating if Heller thought he could get away with writing him that way. In addition to Bangley, Peter starts the novel with a regulation Loyal Canine(TM), Jasper.
There's a community of Mennonites to whom Hig occasionally delivers scavenged Coke but whom he's careful to stay 60 feet away from at all times during those rare visits. Every other human who appears, Bangley and Hig kill on sight. In fact, they've rigged a lure to attract people to the exact spot in the airport where it's easy to ambush them and pick them off from a distance. When it all Gets To Be Too Much, Hig takes to the skies in his Cesna for some Manly Aviation and Manly Solitude. He radios air traffic towers out of ironic habit; one time he thought he heard a faint transmission from the tower in Junction, but now he wonders if anyone was really there at all.
The book's front and back cover, and its first several pages are stuffed with breathless reviews from big name newspapers, magazines, and authors. For instance, according to The Boston Globe, "Peter Heller serves up an insightful account of physical, mental, and spiritual survival unfolded in dramatic and often lyrical prose".
Well, let's see. Heller doesn't use quotation marks, and rarely uses punctuation and or complete sentences. Hig's narration spills out in endless, frequently one-line paragraphs, a slightly more evolved "Me Tarzan, you Jane" form of (apparently) Manly Communication. Por ejemplo, here's an early conversation between Hig and Bangley:
I told him I used to build houses.Is this what you'd call "lyrical prose"? And would that same Boston Globe reviewer have praised it or sneered at it if the name attached to it suggested it was written by a teenage girl and not an adult white male?
What kind of houses?
Timber frame. Adobe. Odd custom stuff. Wrote a book too.
A book on building houses.
No. A little book. Poetry. Nobody read it.
Shit? He took a measured sip of Coke watching me as he tipped back the bottle, watching me as he set it back down on his thigh, kind of appraising me with a new appreciation not readable good or bad. Adjusting the context.
Wrote for magazines now and then. Mostly about fishing, outdoor stuff.
The relief it swept his face like pushing off a cloud shadow. I almost laughed. You could see the gears: Phew, outdoor stuff, Hig is not a homo.
Growing up I wanted to be a writer. A great writer. Summers I worked construction, framing. Like that. Tough to make a living as a writer. Anyway I probably wasn't so good. Got married bought a house. Led to another thing then the other thing.
Long story, I said.
Here's another example of what The New York Journal of Books calls "sparkling prose with truly memorable, shining, characters", a passage in which Bangley, Hig, and Jasper have just killed a family of scavengers who had the misfortune of stumbling onto Hig's turf:
Bangley is down there among the black figures sprawled. Jasper already moving one to the other, not stopping, nosing, the low growl.Get it? These are Stoic, Taciturn Men who Do The Tough Things That Need To Be Done. But lest readers start to wonder whether they actually need to do all of those things, or if Hig is maybe kind of a monster, Heller makes sure to let us know what Real Monsters look like, in a scene where Hig encounters a different group of scavengers who had the misfortune to stumble onto the abandoned semi truck of Coke Hig considers he has exclusive rights to loot. Hig kills some of these men, turns Japser lose on the corpses, forces the others, weeping and fearful for their lives (the way Heller writes this makes clear that he considers crying and visibly not wanting to die in front of other men emasculating) to load Coke into his plane at gunpoint:
Look at this Hig. They never should have done it.
He doesn't sound unhappy.
Bangley has reached up and switched on the LED headlamp banded to his cap. His cap is on backward. He shines it on the short man, the one in the cowboy hat, the hat now tumbled into a drainage furrow a few feet off. It's a boy. Maybe nine. About the age. Melissa seven months pregnant when. Nine years ago. This boy is thin, hair matted and tangled. A hawk feather tied into it. Face hollow, a shadow smirched with dirt and exposure. Would have been born into this. Nine years of this. Piecing the jigsaw puzzle of this world into some dire picture in his head to end cast as an extra in Bangley's practical joke.
He grunts. Arms in the hands of babes. Should have left him behind.
Where?
Bangley shrugs, swings his head up, the light up into my eyes, blinding.
I wince down against the harsh white blare but don't turn.
Then when he wandered out of the creek starving tomorrow you would have shot him just like the others, but in full daylight and at three hundred yards not thirty.
I can't see anything but the light, but I know Bangley's grin is straight across and grim.
Hig you haven't learned a goddamn thing in all this time. You're living in the past. Makes me wonder if you appreciate any of this. Goddamn.
He walks off. He means do I deserve it. To live.
I walk away leave Jasper to his business. We will bury them tomorrow.
This is what I do, have done: I strip off haunches arms breast buttocks calves. Slice it thin soak in salt brine and dry to jerky for Jasper for the days between. You remember the story of the rugby team in the Andes. The corpses were corpses already dead. They did it to survive. I am no different. I do it for him. I eat venison, bottom fish, rabbit, shiners. I keep his jerky in airtight buckets. He likes it best of all his food I'm sure because of the salt. Tomorrow I will do it again but not the boy, I'll bury him not with any tenderness or regret just in one piece with his hawk feather.
Pony Tail swung a long necklace of shriveled leather pieces when he bent over. Both of them smelled like death.So there you have it. Killing people and turning them into jerkey for your dog? As long as they're adults, it's all good! You are a Stoic, Taciturn Man who Does The Tough Things That Need To Be Done. Killing people and turning them into jewelry? That is monster stuff, and you will earn some Swift Vigilante Justice at the hands of a Stoic, Taciturn Man.
You're a dead man anyway, Pony Tail grumbled, passing me with a load.
What'd you say?
Nothin. Grunting the cases through the jump door.
What the fuck did you say?
He turned, passed. I stopped him with the barrel of the AR.
What was that about being a dead man?
Shoved the barrel into his ribs hard. His grunt.
The A-rabs. You can kill us but the A-rabs will kill you.
What d'you mean the A-rabs?
We heard it. In Pueblo. Ham Radio. The A-rabs. They're here. Or coming. Kill us all.
He spat. Inches from my boot.
What is that? Shove.
What is what?
That. Your necklace. His eyes gold green in the last full sun. Mocking.
Them are cunts. Dried cunts.
I pulled the trigger. Tore him open. Without thought. Left him sprawled back on the road, guts spilled.<
He stood straight, swallowed
Anyway, we'll skip over a lot of tedious "plot" in which Bangley belittles Hig for not being violent enough, Hig decides he's had it, takes Jasper on a hunting trip into the mountains, and Jasper dies of exposure. Hig and Bangley then kill another group of people who had the misfortune to stumble onto Hig's turf after Hig returns, prompting Hig to fuel up his Cesna and fly off into the sunset as far as it will go so he can Grieve In Manly Solitude. And if he decides he doesn't want to die in Manly Solitude, hey, there's always the possibility of refueling at Junction and returning home. This is basically the entire first half of the book.
The second half of the book is basically Penthouse Letters.
With a few gallons of fuel left in the tank, Hig flies over a secluded canyon in the mountains. Here's what happens next, in Heller's trademark "savage, tender, brilliant" (per Glen Duncan's glowing review) prose:
A stone hut against the cliff. Smoke wafting from. A stone bridge over the creek to the field. Cattle on the watered grass. Half a dozen.It was at this point that I started to get a very. Bad. Feeling. The text continues:
Cattle.
And.
A garden plot larger than ours. Fed by a ditch cut from an oxbow of the creek. And.
A figure in the garden bent.
And.
It's a woman.
Long dark hair tied back. Unbending to stand. Hand to forehead, shading to watch the plane.The man shoots out the window of Hig's plane, forcing him to make an emergency landing. But Hig has more important things on his mind than surviving the danger he's in:
A woman in shorts, man's shirt tied at the waist. Barefoot? Barefoot. Tall and lanky. Standing straight, tall, shielding her face and watching e. Mouth in a wide circle. Yelling? Yes.
A figure now out of the house if that's a house, a man with a gun. Old man. ... In that instance I knew what I had come for.
My first glad instinct was to climb down there with the AR-15 and turn the old bastard into hash at close range. That felt good. It was feeling something, not morose. Hig, the SOB did you a favor. Woke your sorry ass up. Just was doing what you would have done to defend his hearth and home and woman.We'll skip a bunch more bloat in that vein while Hig lands the plane and then creeps to the top of the canyon. Heller explicitly tells us he's channeling Bangley as he plays mind games with the man and woman, sending them nonsensical messages on pieces of paper ("I" "Am" "Not" "A" "PHEASANT") before graduating to psychological intimidation and actual violence, lobbing grenades at them alongside additional coercive messages ("I-COULD-BLOW-YOU-TO-SMITHER-EENS-BUT-I-WONT" "SEE?-NEXT-ONE-MIGHT-HURT" "DON'T-MAKE-ME-RUN-OUT-OF-PAPER").
Woman.
Was that his woman? The old badger. Who knew what arrangements were made in this world. First instinct was to climb down there and murder the fucker and take his woman. And. Why not? ...
Double U-O-M-A-N. First sight of one viable, one tall, one without the blood sickness probably, and not frozen on a poster in Bangley's shop or spilled on the ground behind you, too young, with a kitchen knife in her hand—first sight and you are willing to forget everything. Like checking the landing.
The man Hig has ambushed and intimidated on his home turf (The same thing that Hig murders every other human being he's encountered thus far in the book for doing, let's not forget) is understandably enraged "If a man can spark he was sparking: mouth compressed in rage and his eyes which were gray were throwing off glints of fury." And as for the woman?
One images a real woman would also be angered and terrified by Hig's actions. But Heller doesn't write real women, he writes Real Women, so instead we get this: "She looked scared but also something else: mildly amused". And "Kept the scope on her. She smiled. Actually smiled. It was subtle, small, but at ten power I could see the damn thing."
Real Women, obviously, are intrigued by violent lunatics who appear out of nowhere and threaten to kill them and their families. Thus, Heller has Hig continue his...flirtations.
How should we do this? Yelling.Hig tells them he's coming down.
Silence.
Gramps! Relax! If I wanted to kill and rape and plunder you'd be dead by now!
Pause while he took that in.
I forgive you! I yelled.
I mean for trying to kill me more than twice! Nearly wrecking my plane. Nothing personal. I know. Would've done the same thing myself.
If you decide to kill me you'll feel really bad later! I promise you'll deprive yourself of the best part of your day!I'll skip a lot of tedious Manly nonsense where Hig sneaks into the canyon, decides to take a nap, the man captures and interrogates him, and the man's daughter, who remember, is a Real Woman who doesn't find violence and rape threats threatening, convinces her father to set him free. Hig wanders off to have a Manly Sulk in Manly Solitude, then returns, tells the family he's leaving, and demands that the father give him his weapons back. Which the man does. And then?
She smiled. Oh man. I was gone. I thought Maybe, maybe he is her dad. What a fool.
He hesitated, picked the handgun off the table, handed it to me butt first. I holstered it. He lifted the rifle to muster, across his chest, passed it to me.Guys, I bet you are thinking, "Okay, having tried compassion only to have that VERY OBVIOUSLY NOT WORK TO THEIR BENEFIT, surely now is the point in the book where the man and his daughter kill this deranged, violent, lying sociopath in self defense. Right?
Thanks. Thanks for kicking me in the ass.
I hauled off and slugged him.
Right?
Feel free to insert the Padme meme here.
In this "at times funny, at times thrilling, at times simply heartbreaking" book about the "series of decisions about how we live in whatever world we've got" (per the Salt Lake City Weekly) these characters are not going to act out of common sense, self-preservation, or intelligence. Oh, not at all.
I turned around and walked across the open ground upstream, my back as naked and ready for a bullet as for the fall and click of the next moment.To recap: You are a woman hanging on to life by a razor's margin in a post-apocalyptic hellworld. A strange man shows up out of nowhere, threatens to kill you, fires assault weapons at you and your father, throws grenades at you and your father, suggests he might rape or kill you and your father, physically assaults your father after your father shows him mercy and your reaction is to...
* You, You, Hey.
What?
Higs, right? That's what you said.
Hig.
Hig. You want some lunch?
...offer to cook him lunch.
That thing you are hearing right now? That is my laughter. Sorry, I mean, it's my "breath catching and my heart aching" (which is what the Aspen Daily News says reading this book will do to readers). And I mean, my heart was aching a bit at this point. ::ahem:: Anyway.
We'll skip over a bunch more pages as Hig moves in with the family and nothing much happens until the father takes him aside and demands that Hig fly them out of the canyon so they don't starve to death in the coming drought. Wait, a drought is coming? you ask. Apparently. How does the father know there will be a drought? He just does, okay.
Anyhoodle. It's clear Hig's time in Eden is drawing to a close, so of course Heller is going to let him get his nut on. How will it happen? I am sure literally no one among you is asking right now.
Too bad. I am going to tell you all anyway. Like I said, Hig wants to get his nut on, but as a Manly Man he is Too Proud To Beg. But don't worry! The daughter is a Real Woman, ready to do her part. One day, she strips naked and waits for Hig at the waterfall where he goes for his Routine Manly Solitude.
Right now, you are thinking that you already saw this softcore pornos like this on Cinemax and there is no need for Heller to rehash any of them here. Indeed, you have and there is not. But Heller does anyway:
She was willowy thin. I could just see her ribs. Long legged, the curve of her hips sweet, her mound prominent, the touch of dark hair not fully hiding her. Her breasts smallish, but not small. Tight as apples. What do I mean? Firm, full. Collarbones, nice shoulders. Strong arms, slender but strong. A bruise on her upper right thigh. I must have stopped breathing. She was, I don't know. Perfect. My one dumb thought was: How on earth did you frigging hide all that? In a man's too large shirt? My eye must be out of practice! That's what I thought. All in a split second. Because reflexively I turned to look up at the wall and saw the peregrine land in the nest carrying a bird, a pretty damned big bird.Now, Heller may be writing about life in an unrelentingly realistic "battered and brutal time" (per Scott Smith's glowing blurb) without indoor plumbing, safety razors, or personal care products, but we all know female bush is gross, so conveniently, the novel's inevitable fuck interest naturally doesn't grow much of one. And while Heller is all about Gritty Realism(TM) as regards butchering human beings for dog food, the gritty realism of real women having pit and leg hair is something he is just not prepared to think about thankyouverymuch.
It was at this point that I found myself fervently wishing language had never been invented, because then I would never have found myself reading this ridiculous book.
Anyway, they have a dumb conversation about the bird they just saw, and then Hig takes his blue balls off to his hammock for some Manly Displacement Pondering about things that are Definitely Not Female Body Parts.
A while later she found me in the shade. Your turn, she said, smiling.Then we get several pages of the daughter being coquettishly cool and hard-to-get during the day but climbing into Hig's hammock at night. Then she starts climbing into Hig's hammock wearing progressively less clothing. Then, we get a scene where the father takes Hig aside and grudgingly tells Hig in so many I Have No Patience For Small Talk words that Hig may nut his daughter. Then, because Hig's still a Manly Man who's Too Proud To Beg, one night the daughter lies down on the ground next to his hammock and does a strip tease.
She was passing the hammock, leaning her head, wringing out her hair. Where I was lying in a kind of endocrine shock—trying at once to recall and push away every detail I had just seen. Startled again by the sight of her and sure she could read my mind. I grinned back, sheepish as a sixteen year old.
When are you gonna show me yours? she said.
She raised one eyebrow: maybe. She raised up on her elbows and shrugged the shirt down her arms. Then she rolled over and lay on her stomach, her head on her crossed hands. Offering another vista. The world can end but you are not immune oh no.If Heller could get the David Attenborough narration ("The female presents herself to the successful male") he would. Predictably, they go directly to penetrative sex, which predictably gives the daughter an orgasm, she being a Real Woman and all.
If you want, you can just look at me, she said. It's probably been a long time. I'm in no hurry.
She raised her sweet butt into the air.
I should mention that the daughter was apparently a doctor, in the before times, the long long ago. She is presumably aware of the potential dangers associated with pregnancy and childbirth even in a modern, developed world with condoms, and birth control, and sanitation, and medicine, and hospitals, and emergency medical care. But do we get even a hint of that here, in this, "the world's most poetic survival guide" (at least according to Publisher's Weekly), a glimmer of the suggestion that the possibility of finding herself pregnant might have occasioned just a seed of anxiety in the mind of a female doctor—or indeed any woman—living in a post-apocalyptic plague-wracked hellworld where precisely none of those things are available? Let alone this female doctor, who also (I should mention) apparently has an autoimmune disease that makes her bruise and bleed at the drop of a hat (and oh, does Heller dwell lovingly on all those bruises). Of course not! Silly reader, that's the sort of stuff that only real women worry about.
What does trouble this Real Woman is the sudden memory that she has a dead husband. In fact, it troubles her so much she has second thoughts about letting Hig do sex on her again. Hig feels very bad about this:
We didn’t make love again for for days. Five. Can’t pretend I didn’t count. And when we did, when we were about to—I mean we lay on the blanket naked, holding each other, not kissing, not talking, but just our noses exploring ears and necks, and hands reconnoitering a territory made brand new by these new recordings of loss-when it seemed to be time to consummate or at east somehow celebrate this new vulnerability, I pulled her on top of me and she was not wet and I had trouble entering and I could feel that it hurt her, and for some reason I though of [her dead husband]—the dream [dead husband]—and a wave of panic overcame me and I lost my erection.Oh wait, you thought I meant Hig felt bad about the fact that the daughter was grieving for her dead husband. How cute you are. Obviously Hig feels bad because it's such a downer when women are too dry for you to get your penis into them.
Damn the dream world. His ghost was wading through it and ruining what only a few days ago had been as euphoric as any love affair I’d know.
And jeez, guys, if only there was something sexually arousing you could do for a woman that doesn’t involve a penis in a vagina.
Gosh.
Too bad nothing like that exists in the world.
The scene continues:
She gave my wanger a consolatory double squeeze which made me feel worse. Sighed heavily—I read Disappointment—and rolled off to the side. Her arms came around me gently. Lying on the blanket, arm in arm, in an unconsummated paralysis. I felt lonelier then than I had felt before the canyon. The hearts thudded and ricocheted against each other, but the spirit did not. I could not stroke her more than absently, or kiss her, or even talk with authenticity. As if failing in consummating love had robbed me of all legitimacy as a lover. Had stripped my license to love or even express affection. It was awful.It's just so terrible that penis-in-vagina sex is the only kind of sex that anyone can have. That it’s impossible to even touch a woman unless your dick is inside her. Just awful.
(PS: "Wanger." "WANGER." Talk about "a novel with the soul of haiku" (per The Columbus Dispatch)).
But anyway, back to Hig's Important Existential Problem. After another paragraph of moping about how "what may have been transmitted at the critical moment the moment of truth, of penetration, was her own memory of the dream", something surprising happens:
Hig.Huh. Turns out there is something sexually arousing you can do for a woman that’s not putting your penis in her vagina.
She whispered the word, a wind eddying in my ear.
Huh?
Will you give me oral pleasure?
She said it in a French accent and I knew she was referencing that old classic, Pulp Fiction.
Really? You don’t want that.
She nodded, her head against my chest.
Okay. Big exhale. Duty calls.
I did. I kissed down between her breasts, her little innie belly button, the shallow horns of her pelvis, the lower plain of her concave belly, the patch of tight curls, the little lips, the smooth kernel, inhaled her, and then I went to work. Like a job.
According to Heller, it’s a real chore.
Man, is Heller insecure about masculinity. So insecure that he can't conceive of oral sex as an end in its own right. As something that a woman would confidently ask for, even a woman confident enough to repeatedly strip naked to seduce you. So insecure about masculinity that he thinks of oral sex as something women have to jokingly, apologetically, indirectly suggest their partners might maybe possibly consider doing, a yucky obligation men occasionally have to grit their teeth and power through in order to get to have "real" sex.
Which, predictably, Hig and the daughter do, and which predictably is what makes the daughter come, not the oral sex. Man, is this ever the sort of novel "that makes you happy for literature" (per Juno Diaz and The Wall Street Journal).
Anyway, this is—pun mostly not intended—pretty much the climax of the book. In its final 50 pages, the three of them manage to fly back to Erie, find Bangley on the edge of death after having slaughtered some more unfortunates during Hig's absence, the daughter nurses him back to health (noooow we see why Heller made her a doctor, because some character was going to have to tend to Bangley during his long convalescence, but nursing and caregiving are wimmin's work, and Heller's not about to have Hig engage in that), and that's it. The end.
Except, oh! I completely for got to mention: before the three make it back to Erie, they take a brief detour to Junction, where they discover that Hig hadn't imagined things—there really is someone in the air traffic tower, radioing any aircraft that fly by. It will probably not surprise you to learn that said person is doing this to lure pilots to the airport so they can kill them.
For some reason this utterly enrages Hig and the dad, who promptly undertake a Call of Duty-esque raid to execute this person for having the temerity to do the exact same thing Hig, Bangley, and literally everyone else in this novel has been doing the entire time: killing every other human they encounter on sight.
And just who was this Big Bad, anyway? Get ready, cause Heller has a curveball up his sleeve for you. It's not Bangley's long-lost twin brother, not those murderous A-rabs who Heller foreshadowed but did nothing with, lo those 150+ pages ago, but...
...wait for it...
...an elderly cat lady. No joke. Because of-fucking-course it is:
The smell. A barrier. I gagged and spit. Cats everywhere. Freaked by the shooting, running over the radar keyboards, the comm panels, arched bristled and hissing against the dead black flatscreens. Calicoes and blacks, blue eyed Siamese.Hig and the dad shoot her and her husband dead, and the natural order of things is set to rights. Score one for Vigilante Justices at the hands of Stoic and Taciturn Hardened Men!
...an old woman with her hair, no shit, in a bun. It was Aunt Bee. She stood next to a spotting scope on a tripod and wore, no shit again, a calico dress printed in blue cornflowers. She wore wire rimmed round glasses. Could have been your school librarian, your doting grandma, the face on the pancake syrup label.
And really, that's just what's so utterly bonkers about this book. Like, repeatedly throughout its 319 pages, as Hig kept failing to feel less regret about showing mercy to strangers instead of summarily executing them; kept feeling shame about not enjoying guns, or killing, or violence as much as Bangley; kept talking about how isolated and lonely he felt; kept feeling shame and horror when tragedies made him cry; throughout that entire time, I kept waiting for Heller to roll out that gradual character progression: that slowly dawning realization that compassion, and distaste for violence, and the mere existence of emotions; that the desire for community—hell even the trivial recognition that liking to cook—that none of those things are incompatible with What It Means To Be A Man. But that is not, not, not the story progression Heller is putting this character on. No, not at all.
There's a short paragraph in the section of the book where Hig, the father, and the daughter are preparing to leave the canyon that's pretty fucking telling. The daughter wants to take some of their lambs with them, but Hig runs the numbers and realizes that not only do they not have enough fuel to take the lambs' extra weight on board, but: “My calculations showed that the best way to have any chance at all of taking off, of clearing the trees, was to leave the old man.” Hig is Very Worried. Not at the horrible necessity of having to abandon the father of the woman he's nutting, but at the possibility the father might try to kill Hig when Hig explains this.
But then Hig hits on an idea. He’ll let the dad do the calculations himself, and then there can be no question that they have no choice but to abandon him. So that’s exactly what Hig does:
He was sharp. Whatever he did before on the ranch, in the service, he didn’t waste time. He took the pencil and went to work. Didn’t ask, Is this right? Is this how you do it? Been a while…nothing like that. A man without the habit of justifying himself, making excuses Didn’t ever say, Higs check my math, will you? Nope, the SOB looked once at the problem, began to multiply, fill in the blanks work the equation.And it's just crystal clear from the previous 233 pages (and the following 85, for that matter) that this is Heller's definition of a True Masculinity in a nutshell: Being a taciturn, take-charge “SOB” who consults no one, relies on no one, and uses his Galaxy Brain to grapple with Hard Truths and wrestle Big Problems into submission all by himself, because asking for—let alone—needing help from other people is for weaklings.
To Heller, the source of Hig's problems isn't the narrow definition of traditional masculinity and the assumptions Hig makes about what "men" should or shouldn't be like or do. The source of Hig's problems is precisely that Hig isn't the alpha male patriarch in the room...and the solution to Hig's problems is to become the alpha male patriarch in the room. To leave zero doubt in anyone's mind that Hig is "not a homo". To become The Man everyone depends on, the man everyone defers to, the only guy who's fucking a woman, the lone Penis Human at the top of the pyramid who commands respect from everyone and depends on no one for anything.
That's Heller's happily-ever-after ending for Hig: cucking Bangley (who starts the book as its alpha male and ends it as a cripple who owes his life to Hig), cucking the dad (a former Navy SEAL and Afghanistan vet who starts the book ably defending his home and daughter and ends depending on Hig for his home and his life, while Hig fucks his daughter), and saving the Mennonites, to whom Hig brings a female to do the nursing and caregiving Hig won't, and on and on.
And here's the thing. I have no problem with juvenile wish-fulfillment fantasies, whether they're catering to horny woman romantasy readers, or 14-year-old boys, or 40-year-old boys. But the minute that you and your publishing bro buddies start suggesting that your 40-year-old-boy wish-fulfillment fantasy is saying something beautiful, transcendent, and universal about the human experience..that is the point at which I have no regret about pointing out how cringe you are you are and how dumb your juvenile wish-fulfillment fantasy is. This author is cringe and his juvenile wish-fulfillment fantasy is dumb.
What I Am Currently Reading
Lake of Souls - Ann Leckie
I'll have this wrapped up by next Wednesday for sure.
The Goddess and the Tree - Ellen Cannon Reed
I read the prologue.
The Laws of Brainjo – Josh Turknett
A reread; first completed in 2023.
What I’m Reading Next
This week I acquired Danielle Jensen's A Fate Inked in Blood, 김미정의 한나랑 떠나는 신나는 성경여행, and 한재홍의 콩쥐 팥쥐.
これで以上です。
Tags: